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It's a reasonable question - but the price can never be truly "free," because there's a cost to investment / build that product - meaning costs are non-zero. Th

It's a reasonable question - but the price can never be truly "free," because there's a cost to investment / build that product - meaning costs are non-zero. Therefore the negative profit in the short-term due to pricing is called "undercutting," as other companies (generally) don't have that luxury in the long run. You have to ask: why is it free? - A thousand engineers working on a non-revenue product for Google is like "pennies," when it might be a whole company anywhere else. - How are you funding that negative profit? Using leverage and profit from strong market position elsewhere. Therefore: anti-competitive, as other companies in the space don't have similar leverage. Now, a startup can, say, operate at negative profit and not count as "anti-competitive," because a startup most likely has fractional market share. But imagine you're building a startup in a brand new space, and Google decides to also enter that space. If you price your product at $10, and Google says "we're pricing at $0," you can imagine how no one could compete with that for the long-term. Hence why monopoly / anti-competitive rules are important.

fixermark 8y ago
If we're talking app stores, I think it's free because no consumer would pay for it. F-Droid is also free.
- shock 8y ago
  I don't think this argument holds generally. For example people used to pay for GPS apps (iGO, TomTom, etc.) before Google Maps/other navi apps were available for "free" on smartphones. Google, in fact, might have destroyed a market by making Google Maps "free".
  - petre 8y ago
    > Google, in fact, might have destroyed a market by making Google Maps "free". Might is an understatement. Google destroyed the market leading to Navteq and Tele Atlas being aquired by Nokia and TomTom.
  - s3r3nity 8y ago
    Well that, AND prioritizing their Maps product above better offerings in the marketplace in search results early on in its lifecycle, when it was trying to get scale and data to improve while hurting competitors.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      I don't remember the existence of better offerings early in the Maps lifecycle that Google search prioritized Maps results over. Maybe I'm too young? There was Mapquest, and to my memory, Google came out of the starting gate with something close to feature parity with them.
      - s3r3nity 8y ago
        Mapquest and Yahoo Maps were the dominant mapping platforms until Google Maps removed competitor links in the search results. [1] Google during this time was pushing for "universal search," which would break away from vertical search paradigms into a single blended set of results. This was also when traffic spiked to Google Maps and away from MapQuest / other competitors. And when you look at the data, the change in traffic is not due to users searching for "Google Maps" in the query more - but rather Google just linking to its own results more. [2] It was when I knew the whole "Don't be evil" motto was bullshit. [1] https://searchengineland.com/google-no-longer-linking-to-yahoo-mapquest-maps-10267 https://searchengineland.com/google-no-longer-linking-to-yah... [2] https://searchengineland.com/comscore-to-report-google-maps-now-number-1-16570 https://searchengineland.com/comscore-to-report-google-maps-...
        warbaker 8y ago
        Maps was always a better product, though...
  - orangecat 8y ago
    Google, in fact, might have destroyed a market by making Google Maps "free". Which is a good thing if it results in more people getting quality services. gcc and Apache destroyed the market for commercial compilers and web servers; should they have been prohibited?
    - themihai 8y ago
      >> gcc and Apache destroyed the market for commercial compilers and web servers; should they have been prohibited? The difference here is that Apache didn't shove you a PlayStore, maps app and a browser in order to use their libraries. I want the products to "win" on merit not on reach. You also forget that Apache is open source which is not the case with Maps/youtube where your access can be denied at any time. >> Which is a good thing if it results in more people getting quality services. This gives no guarantee that Google won't start to charge its users for these services at some point in time. And there really won't be any competition as all the competitors have been killed by the "free" price. Actually it seems they already set the price. You may argue that the end user doesn't pay for Playstore etc but we both know they pay...just like they paid for Windows. "Google said it would sell a license for a package including its Google Play...."
      - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        > The difference here is that Apache didn't shove you a PlayStore, maps app and a browser in order to use their libraries. That's a completely independent complaint that has nothing to do with Android being available for free. You would have the same tying objection if Android cost money, right?
    - josefx 8y ago
      Quality? I spend two hours in the english countryside trying to find my goal and google kept routing me over a road that was removed years ago. I could mention other cases were google maps was worse than useless, but it boils down to a single issue: With commercial products you could pay and have some quality guaranteed. Google gives the average users the same quality guarantees they pay for: none.
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> It's a reasonable question - but the price can never be truly "free," because there's a cost to investment / build that product - meaning costs are non-zero. Those are fixed costs which can be amortized in other ways. For example, Google could make both the OS and the hardware to sell together, like Apple. In fact, they do, with the Nexus/Pixel devices. Once they've done that, the OS development is a sunk cost. Giving it away to others or not has no effect on cost, or has negative cost if some of the others make contributions that you can use on your own devices without paying to develop them internally. And it grows the ecosystem your products are a part of, which is a valuable service the other vendors are providing for which some remuneration is appropriate, which could offset some or all of the cost of the software. Moreover, software costs money to develop, but how much of the development cost should be apportioned to each unit? That depends how many units there will be. Not have been -- will ever be. This value is not known and can be arbitrarily large. For something like Android it is very large. If you amortize the development cost over the number of devices there are/will be, the cost per device is negligible -- small enough it would be eaten by transaction costs if you tried to collect it. And claiming that companies can't give away software because they're large is clearly bad policy. It would imply that e.g. they can't contribute to Linux.

fixermark 8y ago

If we're talking app stores, I think it's free because no consumer would pay for it. F-Droid is also free.

shock 8y ago
I don't think this argument holds generally. For example people used to pay for GPS apps (iGO, TomTom, etc.) before Google Maps/other navi apps were available for "free" on smartphones. Google, in fact, might have destroyed a market by making Google Maps "free".
- petre 8y ago
  > Google, in fact, might have destroyed a market by making Google Maps "free". Might is an understatement. Google destroyed the market leading to Navteq and Tele Atlas being aquired by Nokia and TomTom.
- s3r3nity 8y ago
  Well that, AND prioritizing their Maps product above better offerings in the marketplace in search results early on in its lifecycle, when it was trying to get scale and data to improve while hurting competitors.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    I don't remember the existence of better offerings early in the Maps lifecycle that Google search prioritized Maps results over. Maybe I'm too young? There was Mapquest, and to my memory, Google came out of the starting gate with something close to feature parity with them.
    - s3r3nity 8y ago
      Mapquest and Yahoo Maps were the dominant mapping platforms until Google Maps removed competitor links in the search results. [1] Google during this time was pushing for "universal search," which would break away from vertical search paradigms into a single blended set of results. This was also when traffic spiked to Google Maps and away from MapQuest / other competitors. And when you look at the data, the change in traffic is not due to users searching for "Google Maps" in the query more - but rather Google just linking to its own results more. [2] It was when I knew the whole "Don't be evil" motto was bullshit. [1] https://searchengineland.com/google-no-longer-linking-to-yahoo-mapquest-maps-10267 https://searchengineland.com/google-no-longer-linking-to-yah... [2] https://searchengineland.com/comscore-to-report-google-maps-now-number-1-16570 https://searchengineland.com/comscore-to-report-google-maps-...
      - warbaker 8y ago
        Maps was always a better product, though...
- orangecat 8y ago
  Google, in fact, might have destroyed a market by making Google Maps "free". Which is a good thing if it results in more people getting quality services. gcc and Apache destroyed the market for commercial compilers and web servers; should they have been prohibited?
  - themihai 8y ago
    >> gcc and Apache destroyed the market for commercial compilers and web servers; should they have been prohibited? The difference here is that Apache didn't shove you a PlayStore, maps app and a browser in order to use their libraries. I want the products to "win" on merit not on reach. You also forget that Apache is open source which is not the case with Maps/youtube where your access can be denied at any time. >> Which is a good thing if it results in more people getting quality services. This gives no guarantee that Google won't start to charge its users for these services at some point in time. And there really won't be any competition as all the competitors have been killed by the "free" price. Actually it seems they already set the price. You may argue that the end user doesn't pay for Playstore etc but we both know they pay...just like they paid for Windows. "Google said it would sell a license for a package including its Google Play...."
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      > The difference here is that Apache didn't shove you a PlayStore, maps app and a browser in order to use their libraries. That's a completely independent complaint that has nothing to do with Android being available for free. You would have the same tying objection if Android cost money, right?
  - josefx 8y ago
    Quality? I spend two hours in the english countryside trying to find my goal and google kept routing me over a road that was removed years ago. I could mention other cases were google maps was worse than useless, but it boils down to a single issue: With commercial products you could pay and have some quality guaranteed. Google gives the average users the same quality guarantees they pay for: none.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

> It's a reasonable question - but the price can never be truly "free," because there's a cost to investment / build that product - meaning costs are non-zero. Those are fixed costs which can be amortized in other ways. For example, Google could make both the OS and the hardware to sell together, like Apple. In fact, they do, with the Nexus/Pixel devices. Once they've done that, the OS development is a sunk cost. Giving it away to others or not has no effect on cost, or has negative cost if some of the others make contributions that you can use on your own devices without paying to develop them internally. And it grows the ecosystem your products are a part of, which is a valuable service the other vendors are providing for which some remuneration is appropriate, which could offset some or all of the cost of the software. Moreover, software costs money to develop, but how much of the development cost should be apportioned to each unit? That depends how many units there will be. Not have been -- will ever be. This value is not known and can be arbitrarily large. For something like Android it is very large. If you amortize the development cost over the number of devices there are/will be, the cost per device is negligible -- small enough it would be eaten by transaction costs if you tried to collect it. And claiming that companies can't give away software because they're large is clearly bad policy. It would imply that e.g. they can't contribute to Linux.